I am a busy man. Busy, busy. Like a bee. Or a beaver. Or some other animal that starts with a “b.” Busy as a butterfly? Busy as a badger? Busy as Behemoth?
Anyway, I’ve got translation work today. Sweet translation work on a project which (as usual) I can’t tell you anything about. I will tell you (because it’s redundant) that it’s in Norwegian and I need to run it through the processors between my ears, extruding in the end an English script of rare beauty and grace.
It’s a good script, too. One I’m happy to be involved with. I will tell you that. I don’t think the lawyers will object.
Also, I’m only about a third of the way through the hypertrophied book I’m reading for review, so there wouldn’t be a review tonight anyway.
Instead, I found the video above. It’s by a guy I know nothing about, and my sharing it implies no endorsement of any kind. But he was at the Avaldsnes Viking Festival last summer when I was. So you can get the flavor of it. He missed a great opportunity, though, in not getting a shot of me in my Viking togs.
Today has been quiet for me – in a sense – and busy in another sense. I’ve not stirred abroad nor moved from my habitation this day, even to go to the gym. The gym is, in fact, closed, but I didn’t plan to go there anyway. We’re enduring the Great Blizzard of ’23 – or so the Chickens Little of the media would have us believe. What it’s been doing, in actual fact, is snowing. The winds haven’t been all that strong in Minneapolis, nor the snow especially heavy (thus far). What this storm is, is long. It started the night before last, and is supposed to drag on till late tomorrow.
But I have enough food to get me through, and I had some work to do, which brightens any day. I wish I could tell you about the latest project, which I just turned in. It contains elements that please me. I can’t say more than that. But it helped to warm the winter in my aged heart.
Above, a little video about George Washington’s face – since it’s still Washington’s birthday for a few hours as I write. The near-apotheosis of Washington in our early Republic was probably a political necessity, but it’s regrettable that the reaction to it – which has become malignant paranoia in recent years – has turned many people against him. Washington was (according to my reading) in fact a fascinating, complex man who worked hard at appearing one-dimensional.
I love historical reconstructions like the ones in the video above. But I happen to know that even this one is glamorized. The real Washington was (like a large percentage of his contemporaries) heavily scarred by smallpox. (Andrew Jackson was the same.) Blemishes as common as that were, I suppose, generally overlooked. Smooth complexions were much admired – especially in women, who made it a point to stay out of the sun – but you couldn’t insist on them.
Washington was also – or so I’ve read – very vain about his “figure.” He (like me, I must confess, though I’m not nearly as tall) was built rather broad at the hips. But he refused to believe it, despite what his mirror, and his tailor, told him. He insisted that his breeches be cut to the width he believed they ought to be, rather than what they were. Kind of like reverse anorexia. Thus his pants were always tight and uncomfortable.
But he had a purpose in concentrating on his appearance, in always being “in character,” in never relaxing in public. He felt he was setting a precedent for his nation. Nobody knew how the elected leader of a republic was supposed to comport himself. Washington had to make it up as he went along. As a schoolteacher makes it a point to be very strict during the first few weeks, to set a tone for the class that he can ease up on later, Washington established precedents for the presidency. Later chief executives, like Lincoln, were able to ease up on the dignity a bit, because Washington had left behind such a weight of reverence.
I fear the reverence is about gone now – it’s not all the fault of the present incumbent, either – but Washington did a pretty good job in his time.
I see now that the movie ‘Narvik,’ dramatizing the World War II battle, is coming to Netflix January 23. So I guess it’s okay for me to tell you that I worked on this project as a script translator. It was one of the very first I was involved in.
I look forward to ‘Narvik’ with great anticipation. Not only does it tell the story of a nearly-forgotten, epic moment in the story of the war, but it gives proper credit at last to the Norwegian General Fleischer, who had the honor of being the first commander to defeat the Germans on land in that conflict. And who’s story was tragically suppressed.
I have yet another opportunity to recommend to you (assuming you have a Netflix subscription) a Norwegian miniseries on which I did translation work. In actual fact, not much of my own work made it into The Lørenskog Disappearance in its final form – our team worked mainly on treatments and scene outlines (as far as I remember), and a lot of our stuff seems to have gotten cut. But I still think it’s an intriguing series, and I recommend it.
Tom Hagen (his having the same name as Robert Duval’s character in “The Godfather” is purely coincidental) was and is one of the richest men in Norway, an energy tycoon. He and his wife Anne-Elisabeth lived in a modest home in a community east of Oslo. Their security was minimal. On October 31, 2018, he came home from work early, having been unable to reach Anne-Elisabeth by phone. He found her missing, but there was a note on a chair, demanding a ransom through an obscure form of cryptocurrency and warning him not to contact the police.
He did contact the police though, and what followed has often been second-guessed. Worried that the kidnappers were watching the house, they did not send in a forensic team immediately, leaving time for evidence to disappear or be removed. They made a mistake in their text communications with the ransomers. Tom paid the ransom, in spite of the fact that he’d gotten no proof of life from the kidnappers.
Anne-Elisabeth was never seen again.
After time passed with no further breakthroughs, suspicion began to turn toward Tom. It was learned that the marriage had been strained. Anne-Elisabeth had contacted a divorce lawyer, who thought the couple’s prenuptial agreement, heavily weighted toward Tom’s interests, could easily be broken. Tom was arrested, but the case against him was weak. Eleven days later the court ordered his release, and the investigation has stalled ever since.
The Lørenskog Disappearance is a docudrama. Many of the characters are fictionalized. We view the story through the viewpoints of four different groups: The police, the reporters (two episodes), the lawyers, and the informers. This produces a Rashomon kind of story, in which the same people and events are viewed from different perspectives. Particularly interesting are two reporters – a man who may be biased against Tom by his experience as the child of an abusive father, and a woman who may be biased toward him by her experience as the child of a Soviet political prisoner.
I don’t think it’s a secret that The Lørenskog Disappearance does not offer any final solutions. What it does offer is a fascinating examination of how we view the stories we see on the news.
Though the trailer above is dubbed, the version I watched on Netflix was subtitled.
And the translation work keeps coming in. If I were tired of it, I would not tell you. Because I have an international trip this summer to support. Plus inflation to cover. Also, it’s nice to be needed, when you’re me.
It’s cold, cold, and I have to go somewhere tonight. But tomorrow’s supposed to be warmer, and Sunday warmer still. Maybe this will be the turning point – just as Daylight Savings Time falls, clattering like a muffler off an old car. Maybe spring is coming. Or milder weather, with some consistency, at least.
The song above is an old Faeroese ring dance song, translated into Norwegian. I heard it first from a Norwegian folk group, but their version doesn’t seem to be on YouTube. However, this one isn’t bad, and they illustrated it with footage swiped from the 1958 film, “The Vikings,” starring Kirk Douglas. For its time, that movie made commendable gestures in the direction of trying to be kind of authentic. In some ways. Sort of.
It’s still better than the History Channel series, now metastasized to Netflix, they tell me.
The song is about King Olaf Trygvesson (whom you may remember from The Year of the Warrior), and how he built and launched his great ship, Ormen Lange (the Long Serpent). The chorus goes:
The dance is loud in the hall, when we dance in the ring!
Gladly ride the men of Norway to the Thing of Hildar (a kenning for battle).
Benjamin Moser talks about finding a somewhat old library of English books and how he began to change his opinion of translating world authors into English.
In recent years we have seen writers outside English become global phenomena: Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Haruki Murakami. But such a literary life, the popularity owed to translation, began to seem a little fake to me. And when I read Mizumura I found myself agreeing that, strictly speaking, literary universality does not exist. The books I loved were, after all, about something, not everything. But even in practical and commercial terms, the prominence of English created more losers than winners, favoring, like so many other forms of globalization, a handful of instantly recognizable and inoffensive brands.
…
Translation — not the thing but the unquestioned emphasis on its virtue — started to feel to me like another philistinism masquerading as worldliness.
By worldliness, Moser means people travel the world–or read from around the world–and they start to think they own the place.
Micah Mattix discusses the essay in the latest Prufrock email, saying maybe readers or literary opinion makers should lighten up a bit. “A healthy curiosity is a virtue, of course, but there is nothing wrong with enjoying a work on its own.”
Big news for discriminating fans of historical drama – Atlantic Crossing, the Norwegian miniseries that ran on PBS Masterpiece last spring, and which (I think I’ve mentioned) I worked extensively on as a script translator, won the International Emmy Award for the best TV film or miniseries. The ceremony was last night. I am moderately elevated about this. My boss, Linda May Kallestein, who was a co-writer as well as translator, sent me a photo of herself holding the coveted statuette.
I wasn’t aware of it, but you can order it on DVD now – and it’s not prohibitively expensive.
Still working on translation. This job is a bigger one, in a single chunk, than I’m used to. I’m not complaining at all – that’s money in the poke. But I can’t dawdle with blogging (or reading books to review), so it’s music for you tonight. You’ll take it and you’ll like it.
The song, “Threescore and Ten,” continues the theme of nautical music I started last night. This one is closer to home (for me) though. It’s about fishermen, of whom I come from a long line. It’s a broadside ballad (words by fisherman William Delf, who wrote it for the benefit of the widows and orphans, music traditional) about a devastating storm that struck the northeast coast of England in February 1889. It’s still remembered as one of the greatest disasters to strike the coast around Grimsby and Kingston Upon Hull.
Performance by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem (I actually have this album on vinyl).
Have a good weekend, and may the winds be favorable.
Work has descended on me today, like a squall off Cape Horn. It had been a long-ish calm, and I was getting nervous about it. But today, first of all, I got a referral from a satisfied customer, recommending me to another possible client. That’s gratifying in the extreme. Don’t know if it’ll come to anything, but approval is approval, and I suffer from a constitutional deficiency. Then a substantial script came in for translation, which means a decent pay day coming up over the horizon. Which, as it happens, I can use.
I’ve been reading a book (I’ll review it whenever I get it finished) about the last days of the great sailing ships. I read this stuff with a special fascination, knowing that some of my ancestors were involved in merchant sailing (one of them is supposed to have sailed to China). The author is doing an excellent job describing the hellish conditions under which those old sailors worked, even late in the 19th Century – insanely dangerous duties up in the rigging, miserable food, brutal discipline, dreary drudgery and heart-in-your-throat peril from the elements. For little pay. (That explains the shanty performance I embedded at the top of this post.)
When I think about the fact that I can eke out a living working at a keyboard under my own supervision, in a warm, dry house with enough food to keep me fat, I realize that I certainly belong to the 1% of humanity, from a historical perspective. And so, probably, do you, unless you’re a Chinese or Muslim slave, just because you were born into a lucky century.
More translation work today, and that’s always good news. I generally work with something playing on the TV in the background (for fear that the full force of my intellect, if applied to the text undiluted, might burn out my computer ). Today I’ve been watching something a friend recommended, an Icelandic mystery series on Netflix. It’s called The Valhalla Murders.
Since I never worked on this project, I can comment freely. I won’t describe it in detail tonight – it’s no formula-breaker. At the center, as has become almost mandatory these days, is a Plucky Single Mother. It ain’t entertainment in the 2020s, unless you’ve got a PSM in there. Also a local boy who moved to Norway because he has Issues, and is not happy to have been ordered home to help the Reykjavik police – who aren’t that happy to have him in the first place. Nor in the second place, because when he shows up he’s Intriguingly Rude to everybody.
But what surprised me was the subtitles. I always turn the subtitles on with streamed movies nowadays, because I’m old and sometimes dialogue gets garbled (don’t tell me I’m going deaf, you whippersnapper). You don’t have to use subtitles to watch it yourself, mind you, because it seems to have been double-filmed – the actors are speaking English in the English version. (Though some of it looks like it was overdubbed. Not uncommon even in English-language productions.)
But here’s why I’m confused. What I’ve learned through being a script translator is that the people who write subtitles NEVER look at our translated production scripts. Because of this, the subtitles tend to vary quite a bit from what we wrote (translation is more subjective than I care to admit). They usually seem to have been produced through transcription by someone watching the film. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
But in this production, the subtitles vary extremely from what’s being said by the actors. It looks very much as if the subtitles were produced by following a production script in English, like the ones I and my co-workers do. But that those scripts weren’t used for filming the English version.
